Savona is an unimportant little town between Nice and Genoa, chiefly noteworthy at the present day as the junction for a branch line to Turin. But in the 15th and 16th centuries it was a flourishing place, which gave employment to many distinguished Piedmontese and Lombard artists, the most famous of whom were Foppa and Brea. It also gave birth to two famous popes, Sixtus IV and Julius II, the latter of whom is familiar to most of us from the magnificent portrait by Raphael, three replicas of which exist, in the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace in Florence, and in the National Gallery in London. Sixtus IV erected for himself a superb sepulchral chapel in his native town of Savona: go and see it, if you pass by there, as well as the modern statue of the pope erected by his fellow-citizens. From that chapel this picture, by an otherwise unknown artist, has been abstracted and brought here. We know its author merely by the signature he has placed on a cartellino or strip of paper in the picture itself: Joh[ann]es Mazonus de Alex[andri]a pinxit—shewing that he was born in the Piedmontese town of Alessandria. For the rest, he is a mere name to us.
The picture itself, by no means a masterpiece, has in its centre the Nativity, designed in the usual conventional fashion, and in a somewhat antiquated Lombard style. The Madonna and St. Joseph have very solid haloes: the action takes place in a ruined temple, as often, symbolising the triumph of Christianity over heathendom. In the background are a landscape, and some pleasing accessories. But the lateral subjects give it greater interest. In the compartment to the L stands St. Francis of Assisi, in his usual brown Franciscan robe, as protector of Sixtus IV, who kneels beside him. Notice this way of marking the name of a donor, for the pope was Cardinal Francesco della Rovere. Observe too the stigmata, as far as visible, and compare this much later figure of St. Francis with those in the picture by Giotto and its two imitators. On the R stands a second Franciscan saint, also in the coarse brown garb of his order—the same in whose church Andrea Mantegna studied Donatello, and whom we have seen more than once during our Parisian excursions holding in his arms the infant Christ—St. Antony of Padua. He lays his hand on the shoulder of a second votary—the Cardinal della Rovere, afterwards the stern and formidable pope, Julius II. If you know the National Gallery and the Vatican, see whether you can recognise an earlier stage of the same features which occur in the famous portrait, and also in the figure of the pope, borne on the shoulders of his stalwart attendants into the temple at Jerusalem, in a corner of the famous fresco of the Expulsion of Heliodorus.
Recollect, again, that it was for the tomb of this same Pope Julius II that Michael Angelo produced the two so-called Fettered Slaves, which you have seen or will see in the Renaissance Sculpture Room of this collection. Weave your knowledge together in this way, till it forms a connected whole, which enables you far better to understand and appreciate.
I call your special attention to this picture, among other things, for its historical rather than its artistic value. But I want you also to realise that the man who was painted in this rude and antiquated style in his middle age was painted again in his declining years by Raphael at the summit of his powers, and was a patron of the mighty Michael Angelo at the zenith of his development. This will help to impress upon you better than anything else the necessity for carefully noting chronology, and will also supply a needed caution that you must not regard any work as necessarily early on no better ground than because it is comparatively archaic in style and treatment.
Next inspect the two little companion pictures of St. George and St. Michael by Raphael, on the R wall of the First Compartment in the Long Gallery. These two small works are rare examples of Raphael’s very earliest pre-Peruginesque manner. Morelli has shewn that the great painter was first of all a pupil of Timoteo Viti at Urbino, his native town. If you have not visited Bologna and Milan, however, this will tell you little; for nowhere else can you see Timoteo to any great advantage; and I may observe here that the best time to visit the Louvre is after you have been in Italy, where you ought to have formed a clear conception of the various masters and their relations to one another. But you can see at least, on the face of them, that these two simple and graceful little works are quite different in style and manner even from the Belle Jardinière, and certainly very unlike the much later St. Margaret which hangs close by them. They are still comparatively mediæval in tone: they have a definiteness and clearness of outline which contrasts strongly with the softer melting tones of Raphael’s later work: they show as yet no tinge of the affected prettinesses which he learned from Perugino—still less of his later Florentine and Roman manners. They are painted on the back of a chess or draught board, and were produced for Duke Guidobaldo of Urbino about the year 1500.
Look first at the St. George. The subject here is the Combat with the Dragon; and Raphael, in representing it, has strictly followed the conventional arrangement of earlier painters. No earlier picture for comparison with his treatment exists in this Gallery, though there are plenty elsewhere: but if you will look downstairs at the majolica relief of the same subject in the Della Robbia Room of the Renaissance Sculpture Gallery, you will see how closely Raphael’s work corresponds with earlier representations of the same pretty myth. As you will now have learned, there is always a regular way to envisage every stock subject: whoever produced a Combat of St. George with the Dragon was compelled by custom and the expectations of his patron to include these various elements—a St. George in armour, on horseback, the horse usually white, as here: a wounded dragon, most often to the right: the Princess running away in terror in the distance, or at least crouching abjectly. There is a Tintoretto of this subject, indeed, in the National Gallery, where some critics have blamed the great Venetian painter for making the Princess look away in terror, instead of turning with gratitude to thank her brave preserver. But the conventional representation demanded that the Princess should flee or cower: people were accustomed to that treatment of the theme, and expected always to see it repeated. It was their notion of a St. George. We must set down a great deal in early art to this sense of expectation on the part of patrons. Tintoretto, who came much later than Raphael, after the mighty Renaissance painters had accustomed the world to put up with, or even to look for, novelty of composition, often ventured very largely to depart from traditional motives. In his picture, therefore, the Princess occupies the foreground—a most revolutionary proceeding—while the action itself is relegated somewhat to the middle distance. But if you compare the three representations of this scene to be found in the Louvre—this picture and the two reliefs by Della Robbia and Michel Colombe respectively—you will see that the Princess in earlier times is always represented quite small in the distance, and is usually running away, or at best kneeling with clasped hands in abject terror.
In the Raphael, the dragon is already wounded: but he has broken the saint’s lance, with part of which he is transfixed, while the remainder lies in fragments on the ground behind him. St. George on his prancing steed is drawing his sword to finish off the monster. In the Michel Colombe, on the other hand (downstairs in the French Renaissance Sculpture), the dragon is biting at the lance, which explains why it is broken here, and also why the St. George in Mantegna’s Madonna holds a broken shaft as his emblem or symbol. Observe, however, that while the French sculptor, with questionable taste, makes the dragon occupy the larger part of the field, so as somewhat to dwarf St. George and his steed, the Italian sculptor, and still more the Italian painter, have shewn greater tact in treating the dragon as a comparative accessory, and concentrating attention upon the militant saint, combating with spiritual arms the evil demon. In this picture, as Mrs. Jameson well observes, the conception is on the whole serenely allegorical and religious in spirit. But Raphael himself painted a second St. George, at a later date, for the Duke of Urbino to present to Henry VII of England. In this other picture, which is now in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg, St. George is treated rather as the patron saint of England than as the Champion of Right—to mark which fact he wears the Order of the Garter round his knee, with its familiar motto. As Champion of England, he is rushing on the monster with fiery energy: the picture is in this case more military than spiritual. The moment chosen is the one where he is just transfixing the dragon with his lance: the rescued Princess is here again in the background.
Note once more that these various works are pictures of the combat of St. George with the Dragon. In devotional pictures of the Madonna, St. George frequently stands by Our Lady’s side, in accordance with the wishes of the particular donor, as patron saint of that person himself, or of his town or family. In Venetian pictures, as we have seen, he is very frequent, being one of the patron saints of Venice, and more particularly of the Venetian army and the conquered territory. You will find it interesting, after you have finished the examination of the two Raphaels, to go round the devotional Italian pictures in the Salle des Primitifs, the Long Gallery, and the Salon Carré, in order to note his various appearances. He is usually marked by his lance and his armour: the absence of wings (a point not always noticed by beginners) will enable you at once to discriminate him from St. Michael—as man from angel. The more you learn to look out for such recurrences of saints, and to account for the reasons for their appearance, the more will you understand and enjoy picture galleries, and the more will you throw yourself into the devotional mediæval atmosphere which produced such pictures.
Now turn to the second little Raphael. This represents the closely cognate subject of St. Michael and the Dragon—the angelic as opposed to the human counterpart. The two ideas are at bottom identical—the power of good overcoming evil; the true faith combating heathendom. It is a world-wide myth, occurring in many forms—as Horus and Typhon, as Perseus, as Bellerophon. Hence Michael and George, the superhuman and the human soldier of right, often balance one another, as in these two pictures: you have seen them doing so already in the Madonna della Vittoria: look out for them elsewhere in this conjunction. Both are knights; both are in armour; but one is a man and the other an angel. In this second little picture, St. Michael is seen, clad in his usual gorgeous mail, treading on the neck of the dragon and menacing it with his sword. The dark and lurid landscape in the background contains many fearful forms of uncertain monsters: condemned souls are plagued in it by demons, while a flaming town flares murkily towards heaven in the far distance, the details being taken, as in many such works, from Dante’s Inferno. Or rather, they and the Inferno represent the same old traditional view of Hades. (The figures weighed down with leaden cowls are the hypocrites, while the thieves are tormented by a plague of serpents.) Close comparison of these two little works will give you a good idea of Raphael’s earliest Urbino manner. This fantastic picture, however, though full of imagination, is by no means so pleasing as the dainty St. George beside it.